Some Thought On Creationism

[Heimdall]

Has anyone ever really thought about the implications of a literalist interpretation of the Genesis flood myth? Creationists have attempted to put a scientific spin to this story, postulating either a vapor canopy to explain the source of the 40 days and nights of rain, a rapid tectonic plate movement to explain where the water of the fountains of the deep came from and where the runoff from the rain and the fountains went, or a combination of both. The “vapor canopy” necessary to support a rain of 40 days and 40 nights would have to reach from the surface to 90 kms up. The ensuing pressure and heat from this much water vapor suspended in the air would increase the sea level pressure to 3 times the present and would increase the surface temperature (combined with the greenhouse effect of a 90 km thick cloud) by an average of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit! For every gram of water vapor converting to liquid water, there would be 3 calories of heat energy released. The amount of heat energy released by the conversion of a 90 km vapor canopy to rain would effectively raise the surface temperature to 1500+ degrees Fahrenheit. Since the probability of gopher wood having any insulating quality or fire resistance is extremely low, the result would be an immolated Ark, along with Noah, his family and all the laboriously gathered animals! Once the temperature went above 500 degrees, the rain would effectively cease, long before the 40 days and nights were over. If you instead considered the tectonic plate movement to be the answer, then you would have to take into consideration the friction heat released by the various plates moving at a speed of no less than 3 miles per hour (100000 time the present speed) and the volcanism resulting from large areas of the upper mantle being exposed by the rapidly moving plates of the crust, a combination that would have released enough heat to effectively raise the surface temperature to well over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, once again with disastrous results for Noah and company and a very sudden stop of the rain and the fountains, well before the 40 days and nights were over. A combination of the two would hold all the problems of each, with no relief for Noah and all.

 

Then there are a number of other difficulties interpreting the flood literally. For instance, a conservative estimate by biologists places the number of species in the Animal Kingdom at about 2 million species. (Some recent estimates go as high as 20 million, but I will follow the traditional textbook number to be conservative.) Clearly 2 million pairs of animals would be a tight squeeze in an Ark that Genesis describes as 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by thirty cubits high, which (taking a cubit to be 18 inches) translates as 450 feet long by 75 feet by 45 feet). Deducting no space for interior decks, hallways, cages and bracing (or even the thickness of the exterior walls) this would amount to 1,508,750 cubic feet of space or just over 0.75 cubic feet per pair of animals (i.e., 0.375 cubic feet per animal!), not counting storage space for potable water or fodder for the animals. If we conservatively allow 30 percent of the space to have been taken up by wood construction (the hull, decks, bracing, etc, then the available space falls to 1.063,125 cubic feet or 0.25 cubic feet per animal. Again, this assumes that no space is devoted to water or food for the animals for their year-long voyage. Also, Genesis 7:11-15 makes it clear that all the animals were boarded on the same day. The boarding would have been an amazing feat, requiring a constant flow of 46.5 animals entering the ark each second for 24 hours! Imagine the logistics of sorting the cargo. And think of the poor, slow moving tortoise dodging all those fast-moving feet. Perhaps the Bible left out a miracle or two in the story. Creationists who take the story seriously and have tried to deal with this problem acknowledge that an ark of the stated size could not have held 4 million animals. Among other things, a wooden vessel of that size would not have been structurally strong enough to have supported the weight of that many animals.

 

To deal with the problem of fitting all kinds of animals into such a confined space, creationists have decided that the Biblical "kinds" were not the same as our modern "species" but were more likely categories such as a pair of generic "felines", "canids", "bovines", etc. This could reduce the number of passengers to a more reasonable figure between 15,000 and 30,000 animals (depending on the creationist one asks). This equation of "kinds" with "genus" or even "family" rather than "species" neatly solves the problem of cargo size. It also raises an interesting issue that I have never seen addressed by creationists: How did we get the contemporary 2 million species of today's world from the 15 to 30 thousand "kinds" of Noah's day. That's a tremendous amount of diversification in an amazingly short time (only about 4,500 years). So creationists who balk at the idea that modern species evolved from a single kind over a period of 4 billion years, must be willing to accept the idea (if they stop and think about it) that our current 2 million species evolved from, say 30,000 "kinds", in less than 5,000 years--that's 66.7 species evolving out of each original kind in 4,500 years to be more specific. Even Darwin would not have been so bold as to suggest that evolution could proceed that fast. The bottom line is that creationists aren't really anti-evolutionist. In fact they outdo the secular brand of evolutionism, since their view entails a super-rapid form of the same process of diversification of many species out of single "kinds". Will the real evolutionist please stand up!

 

Literalists must resort to unrecorded miracles to account for the story. In addition to the miracle necessary to load 4 million animals in 24 hours (or the miracle of evolving 2 million species out of 30,000 "kinds" in only 4,500 years), another miraculous increase in the tensile strength of wood would also have been necessary. Pretty soon we have to postulate so many unrecorded miracles to account for various "impossible" aspects of the story, that one wonders why God would not have simply used one miracle to save Noah and the animals from the Flood instead of going to all the trouble.

 

Then there's the problem of the size of the ark. At 450 feet in length would still qualify as the largest wooden vessel ever to have been built? This must have made it the First Wonder of the World, and one that would only have been rivaled by the Great Pyramid, to Noah's neighbors back then for several reasons. First, he built a wooden ship like none that had ever been seen before or since. When he did so, his building techniques were complete innovations, since no shipbuilding tradition existed in his society for him to draw upon. Reed boats of about 20 foot lengths, useful only on local lakes and rivers were all that had been developed so far. Why was his innovationary work never equaled? The only comparable sailing vessels were not built until the nineteenth century, and the longest of those maxed out at 350 feet in length. European shipbuilders were able to achieve this length only with the aid of steel straps, used to reinforce the structural strength of the ships, since wood is too flexible and not strong enough to support a vessel of this length without breaking up when subjected to wave motion. The vessels of this length could be seen to bend and curve as they traveled and they had to hug the shores to avoid storms at sea, and shipbuilders believe that longer vessels cannot be built out of wood because of the structural strength problem.

 

Taken as a story that grew out of local flood experiences in ancient Mesopotamia, the various flood myths of this region and, later, of the Bible lend themselves much better to our scientific understanding of the ancient Near East. The biblical story is merely one of many variations on the original Sumerian flood myth that developed over the millennia that civilization spread from Sumer through the ancient Semitic world. Although it is conceivable that the earliest stories grew up to attest a particularly catastrophic event, one dated around 2900 BCE in southern Mesopotamia, even this need not have been the case. The stories may simply have evolved out of concerns stimulated by the not infrequent occurrence of flooding in general.

 

However, any Christ Cultist or Creationist that wishes to address this thread, please tell us why these thoughts are wrong. - Heimdall (with thanks to Dr Peter Crappo for some astonding facts)

[Poonis]

I hereby object to the plaintiffs argument on the following grounds:

 

1. Plaintiff does not interpret scripture correctly

2. Plaintiff is a godless heathen

3. Plaintiff has committed an abomination by appealing to common sense and logic

4. Plaintiff has failed to present a case based upon merit of belief and resorts to the false god of science

 

Defendant hereby prays to God the court dismisses Plaintiffs argument in its entirity.

[nick5]

Maybe theres a portal inside the ark that leads to another dimension? That would solve the storage problem... but there is still the problem of figuring out how he could gather them all in 1 day...

[white_raven23]

The part I find completely bass ackwards is how they will crap aaaallll over any notion of evolution.....until you get on about the animal types that were in the ark, and how there got to be so many species from those types in such a short amount of time.......the christians hop all over the notion of SUPER-evolution to justify it!

 

Okay so......evolution is complete bullshit if it progresses in a slow and reasonable manner.......but it makes perfect godly sense when it happens super-fast!

 

Sooo. It's stupid to believe in evolution.....you have to believe in evolution instead. Because there's no scientific evidence for evolution (according to the creationists), but there is "evidence" for evolution according to the creationists.

 

Only religious fanatics could be this insanely stupid.

[All Gods Fail]

Oh Heimdall, with your pointy-headed 'facts' and 'logic' - don't you know all things are possible with God?

 

Seriously, good post - but it'll never fly with believers. One doesn't believe in talking snakes because of the overwhelming evidence...

[Fweethawt]

- don't you know all things are possible with God?

It's, "With God, all things are possible."

 

I'm from Ohio, so I should know.

[Dark Helmet]

Not to mention, do you have any idea the amount of waste 30000 pairs of animal would generate everyday? I wonder how Noah and his crew of 8 manage to feed, clean and sleep. If I reckon correctly, with 8 hours of sleep and 30 mins to eat a day, each of them would have had about 0.8611 second to feed three times and clean one time every animal and they would have to keep that going for 15,5 hours every day for a year. Now I don't know if god granted them superpowers but I smell a burnout here before the end of the first week (plus a lot of bullshit and the rotting carcasses of the starved ). So if gawd didn't grant noah some kind of stasis device Futurama style I can bet you they'd never would have make it. Plus anyways where would they get all that food for the animals? What about the special diets of the Koalas or lion's need for meat (unlike that lion in futurama, remember the episodes with the Popplers ). The moral of this story : if god ever tried to save us with an ark, we'd probably be extinct along with most of the animals (hey maybe that was what wiped out the dinosaurs )